We’re like Prometheus, not like god: AI pioneer Marvin Minsky (1927 - 2016) on how evolution shaped human consciousness
Minsky, who built one of the first artificial neural networks and set up MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Project, has died at age 88.
Marvin Minsky, pioneer and doyen in the field of artificial intelligence, died on Sunday night in Boston at the age of 88. Minsky was one of the founders of the Artifical Intelligence Project in 1959 that later became the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Minsky was one of the first people to demonstrate that machines could be made to perform common sense reasoning, thus moving them from being glorified office assistants to helping extend the range of human endeavour.
Minsky did some of the initial research on artificial neural networks and built a learning machine back in 1951 when he was studying mathematics at Princeton. This technology is the basis of cutting edge robotics and deep learning, a hotbed of activity for today’s tech giants Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The AI guru built a range of robotic instruments from visual scanners to mechanical hands with tactile sensors. He has also made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics, computer graphics, machine learning and machine perception. He won many honours during his life including the prestigious Turing Award in 1970. It should be no surprise that he was an acquaintance on first-name basis with greats like John von Neumann and Albert Einstein.
Minsky’s ideas, which he laid out in his books The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine, have had profound impact on cognitive science and artificial intelligence research. He believed that there is more similarity between humans and machines than there are difference. Essentially, humans are the most sophisticated machines ever created, according to Minsky, and human intelligence comes from the work for many semiautonomous but unintelligent “agents”.
In this interview, Minsky discusses what consciousness really is and why when people claim that they are not machines they are showing a lack of respect for the incredibly complex processes that go on inside the human body and brain.
Minsky’s lecture series on The Society of Mind covering a range of subjects like consciousness, panic and suffering, common sense, falling in love, and layers o mental activity are all available online as part of MIT’s OpenCourseWare.